Community leaders regularly make decisions that impact the lives of community members. From where green space will be located to what businesses to approve to what public health interventions to put in place. There’s a growing recognition that such decisions should be informed by data that come from the community itself. Community analytics are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Kathy Ensor.

Kathy Ensor is a leading national voice in statistics and data science and a recognized expert in the methodological development and application of statistics to advance wisdom, knowledge, and innovation. She is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University and director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems. She served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 1999 through 2013 and is the creator of the Kinder Institute’s Urban Data Platform. Ensor’s research specializes in understanding dependent data and developing computational statistical methods to solve practical problems. Ensor served as the 117th president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), heading the ASA board of directors, and has represented the statistics profession on numerous national boards. She is a fellow of the ASA and AAAS and was inducted into the Texas A&M College of Science Academy of Distinguished Former Students in 2021. Ensor holds a BSE and MS in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University.